P3 and ASIMO - The Honda Humanoid Robots

The Japanese researchers (Tsuyoshi Sekitani, Takao Someya and team) at the University of Tokyo have developed “E-Skin,” a skin robotics enabling robots have the sensation of touch. The sheet of rubber is made up of nanotubes to the conduction of electricity, even when it is fully stretched. The rubber is completely malleable and can even be applied to curved surfaces without losing its property conductivity. The skin robotics “E-Skin” could be used to make circuits that can be stretched up to 1.7 times their original size. Read more »

The robots experiencing emotions are a good topic of science fiction, and a Holy Grail for researchers intelligence artificially. Mais machines equipped with a different kind of feeling, the sense of touch, may emerge soon. The results of a new study represent a significant advance in this direction. Scientists have developed a flexible artificial skin sensitive to pressure and temperature.
Last year, Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo and his team have announced that they had developed an electronic artificial skin, ‘E-skin “capable of detecting the pressure. But he lacked their establishment’s ability to feel the heat and it was not flexible enough to adapt to three-dimensional surfaces such as robot fingers. Someya’s team has now corrected these deficiencies by integrating circuits organic transistors pressure-sensitive and semi-conductor sensitive to heat in a thin plastic sheet. Read more »